Revisiting charter 88

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 62, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 568-579

  Rustin, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 70349778842     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: 14602482     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsp025     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Plainly, different societies categorise individuals in different ways-the assignment of universal constitutional entitlements to all adult individuals, regardless of gender, status or race, is a comparatively recent development, of the twentieth century.
2. It was however the crisis of the Algerian War which brought the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and the rise to power of Charles de Gaulle, so here too 'external' events precipitated internal breakdown.
3. D. Marquand, Britain Since 1918, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008.
4. See P. Anderson 'Origins of the Present Crisis', New Left Review, 23, 1964, 26-63
5. P. Anderson, 'Components of the National Culture', New Left Review, 50, 1967, 3-57
6. and T. Nairn, 'The British Political Elite', New Left Review, 23, 1967, 19-25.
7. Anthony Barnett, one of the founders of Charter 88, was previously an influential member of the editorial board of New Left Review.
8. R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, Allen & Unwin, 1961.
9. M. Shanks, The Stagnant Society: A Warning, Penguin, 1961.
10. M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, 2nd edn. (orig. 1981), Cambridge University Press, 2004.
11. On this moment see S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Macmillan 1978
12. and for a discussion of its argument, and for a discussion of its argument, M. Rustin 'Working from the Symptom: Stuart Hall's Political Writing'in B. Meeds (ed.), Culture Politics Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, Ian Randle Publishers & Lawrence & Wishart, 2007.
13. For an account which sets this period in a larger historical context, see D. Marquand, Britain Since 1918.
14. Of course, 'bourgeois revolutions' take different forms. In Britain, its dominant feature has been the partial de-industrialisation and financialisation of its economy, which gives rise to different social and political relations than a capitalism like that of Germany or Sweden in which industrial production rcentral.
15. Several issues unresolved since that period-the Northern Irish question, the powers of the House of Lords, collective social entitlements now represented in arguments about the public services, gender politics-were still at the centre of politics in the late 1980s.
16. It was an unexpected aspect of the Charter 88 campaign that while it was committed to extended democracy, it was not democratic in its own institutional structure in the conventional sense of the term. It sought signatories and supporters, but not members, and was governed by a Council that was not accountable to an electorate. This form of leadership might appear from outside to be more reminiscent of an old-style group of notables than of a democratic social movement. It was argued that this form of organisation was more responsive to public opinion, through the Charter's dependence on popular support for its initiatives, than a formally representative organisation would have been.
17. W. Hutton, The State We're In, Jonathan Cape, 1995.
18. Unfortunately, the 'republican' tradition which had been in recent years revived in the history of political thought, for example in the writings of Quentin Skinner (Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 2008)
19. and J. G. A. Pocock (J. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton University Press,1975), did not become the intellectual resource it could have done for the British constitutional reform programme.
20. P. Dunleavy, 'Assessing How Far Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Coalition Influenced Voting System Reform in Britain', Parliamentary Affairs, 62, 2009, 618-644
21. B. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, Polity Press, 2002.
22. J. Newman (ed.), Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere, Policy Press, 2005.
23. M. Rustin, 'Rethinking Audit and Inspection', Soundings, 26, 2004.
24. R. Williams, The Long Revolution, Chatto & Windus, 1961.
25. A. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States, Harvard University Press, 1970.